‘There are lots of disciplines that, that kind of think they’re important – social, economic, economics politics, but the king of them all is history. It’s the – the past is really about, it’s about the human experience, and if we want to live properly now, and presumably in the future, then the only way that we can begin to address how you do that, is to understand the successes, and the failures, and the regrettable, and the excellent incidents and developments in out past; it’s the building block of where we go from here to the future. The past is also – the past should make us humble. We should realise that we think we’re facing unprecedented political, economic, social problems and that is nonsense. If you look through the past, human communities have had to deal with a whole number of problems so should we- The reason that the past is important is that it makes, or it should make us, a bit more humble about both what’s excellent about our societies today, and what’s bad about them, and to realise that a lot of people in the past have struggled with the same problems and come to their solutions and they’re not- And therefore the reason to study the past is it’s both, it’s both important as a kind of sense of building a continuity, so that we remain socially aware and civically responsible, but it also is, it’s important because it, it, in the end, it confirms to us that we are all humans in it together, and black, white, American, European, Muslim, Hindu, kind of all collapse in front of the fact that we’ve doing this for millennia, as history points out, and the past kind of levels us all to, to basically the human condition and makes us human, and for that reason it’s hugely important.’

‘There are lots of disciplines that, that kind of think they’re important – social, economic, economics politics, but the king of them all is history. It’s the – the past is really about, it’s about the human experience, and if we want to live properly now, and presumably in the future, then the only way that we can begin to address how you do that, is to understand the successes, and the failures, and the regrettable, and the excellent incidents and developments in out past; it’s the building block of where we go from here to the future. The past is also – the past should make us humble. We should realise that we think we’re facing unprecedented political, economic, social problems and that is nonsense. If you look through the past, human communities have had to deal with a whole number of problems so should we- The reason that the past is important is that it makes, or it should make us, a bit more humble about both what’s excellent about our societies today, and what’s bad about them, and to realise that a lot of people in the past have struggled with the same problems and come to their solutions and they’re not- And therefore the reason to study the past is it’s both, it’s both important as a kind of sense of building a continuity, so that we remain socially aware and civically responsible, but it also is, it’s important because it, it, in the end, it confirms to us that we are all humans in it together, and black, white, American, European, Muslim, Hindu, kind of all collapse in front of the fact that we’ve doing this for millennia, as history points out, and the past kind of levels us all to, to basically the human condition and makes us human, and for that reason it’s hugely important.’